Dora The Explorer: THE MOVIE

Context, please? The name "moist meter" already reeks of lewdness...

Page getting responded to: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=15431992660A43063400&page=4#comment-100

Edited by TargetmasterJoe on Aug 9th 2019 at 6:01:10 AM

It's just a jokey name he picked way back in the day and stuck with; the guy has a raunchy sense of humor. His reviews are actually pretty to-the-point and serious as long as the movie isn't total garbage.

Here his general consensus is that it'll be fun for small children but there's absolutely no value whatsoever for adults.

He also admits that when he saw it (alone cause his girlfriend was out of town) the ticket lady laughed at him, and his entire row consisted of small children who were way into it.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Aug 9th 2019 at 3:17:44 AM

From what I've heard from reviews, it actually does have some value for adults, in the sense that everything sounds batshit crazy (and therefore absolutely hilarious).

"Can you say Severe Neurotoxicity?"

So does Boots talk at all in the movie? He's supposed to be voiced by Danny Trejo but all the trailers so him making high-pitched monkey noises or is Danny providing the monkey sounds a la Frank Welker?

Yeah that about right. I also heard that. Adult will find it so batshit crazy that it entertaining, one reviewer i like also said when Dora said to the audience and tell them to repeat words, most of the respond coming from adult, not children.

80% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Finished watching the film. My TL, DR: 1st hour annoying, 2nd hour much more fun.

The first half of the film is much the same as the opening acts of Mean Girls and the 2007 Nancy Drew movie, where the idealist adventurer gets put in high school and everyone is mean to her. This is also the part where the conventions of the Dora series get subjected to the most parody, in a manner that feels not so affectionate because of how unlike the series it feels. Stuff like Dora singing "the poop song" or her overactive imagination being shot in a similar manner to mental illness, it's like it was ripped from a College Humor parody. A shame, considering this movie was written by the writers of the Captain Underpants movie, which was way more faithful to the books' spirit and did better at portraying what it feels like to be a young kid.

On a side note, Madeline Madden's character Sammy really gets unfair writing during these portions. She's introduced as a loner activist type, who Diego thinks annoying but she seems to connect with Dora through their shared political interests. Then it's like some bloke exec came through and was like "No! You can't have two women be friends!", so Sammy abruptly starts treating Dora like an academic rival and being really awful to her. Which makes no sense; why wouldn't she want a friend on the same high performance level who she can relate to? Then Dora suddenly starts shipping her and Diego, who's only been rude to her and who Sammy considers misogynistic, and from there Sammy and Diego enter a forced romance arc. So much of what they saddled her character with needed to be thrown out.

Thankfully, the second half of the movie where the cast starts encountering the real "jungle puzzles" is actually enjoyable. The challenges become clever, the setting looks exciting, the parody of the series becomes brief, and when it does show up it's in more creative form. Like an animated sequence where the characters actually appear to be in the show. In this portion of the film it actually becomes more like "Indiana Jones for kids".

From a colonialism perspective, it's a mixed bag. On one hand, Dora and her parents emphasize that they do not want to take native artifacts and are purely interested in knowledge, contrasted with the villains hungry for gold and treasure. On the other hand, most of the visuals depicting Incan culture frame it as scary and foreign, with walls of skulls, shaman curses, and the only explicitly Native characters being the Lost Tribe at the end^note Isabela Moner (Dora), Madeleine Madden (Sammy), and Temuera Morrison (Powell) all have direct Indigeneous family, but their characters are never stated to themselves be Indigenous. I do appreciate that the film's production included authentic Quechua dialogue in the film, but it's a shame it wasn't subtitled. Non-Quechua-speaking viewers miss out on nuances like Dora referring to herself as a "walker of Pachamama", since Quechua does not have a direct translation for "explorer". At least, they call out British, French, and the United Fruit Company's colonialism, so it's already more than most adventure movies.

Overall, if you want something to tide yourself over while waiting for the Jumanji sequel, this one should fit the bill. And Isabela Moner really carries her Dora portrayal. If Marvel casts her as America Chavez, please give her a writer that doesn't spend an hour mocking her.

Also, that bit from the junior novel where Swiper claims he's 65 and lives in a studio apartment doesn't happen in the movie. In fact, Swiper doesn't really appear all that much, and could've been cut from the film with little problem. It's also odd how, save for one line, nobody finds a bipedal talking fox weird, even after all that screentime spent chiding Dora as having an overactive imagination.

And yes, Danny Trejo voices Boots in one scene.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Aug 14th 2019 at 11:34:39 AM

So I took my niece and nephews to see the film, we were all laughing the entire way through and that says a lot about its overall appeal, a perfect family film. It's very charming, managing to capture the spirit of the show but in a completely different format. It toes the line with some inappropriate material but stops itself from just going over, there is no Precision F-Strike or even Curse Cut Short, Dora herself is not intentionally sexualized and there is an emphasis on adventure over violence, the closest was an animated segment via Mushroom Samba where Alejandro sheds his clothes and runs off, with a half-second glimpse of an animated butt. There are a few things that don't work all that well but they are so brief it's hard to complain.

What stuck with me, and something I felt about the trailers, is that the movie was very dedicated to the character of Dora. At no point does she apologize for who she is, and while the movie likes to poke fun at some of the show and character's eccentricities (she talks to the "camera" as a child, which is later adapted to livestreaming her jungle adventures) we know from the start she is a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass. That actually made the "high school hell" segments work for me, she knows others are mocking her but doesn't get upset until Diego snaps at her. Likewise when the stakes get higher that's when she gets upset and it feels natural to the story and character, if she was cracking under the smallest high school pressure it would have been too much. It's her resolve that makes the movie work, because she ends up rising to the challenge and bringing people to her standard instead of lowering herself to theirs. Isabela Moner is fantastic, she says with a straight face "You're giving me back my yo-yo, this is my most dangerous weapon."

Wait so if this is canon does this mean the whole cartoon was just a make-believe?

It’s implied at the beginning that the cartoon was Dora and Diego’s imaginary adventure games as children. Map and Backpack are fictional, though weirdly Swiper is real and Boots may or may not be able to talk.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Aug 19th 2019 at 10:28:04 AM

That's a pretty clever way of pulling this off if you ask me.

but what about the cartoon where she is a teen lol

And yeah Swiper apparently being real and is apparently an old dad is weird. Though I am surprised Dora didn't make a reaction about it.

There was one bit in the movie where Dora had moved to LA and had her own bed, but decided to sleep outside. Unfortunately, it's the LA night sky so you couldn't see any stars because of the city lights, a plane was flying by and a police helicopter was barking orders. It made me think that this movie was far more clever than anyone could expect.

In terms of box office, though, the movie's a bust. It dropped 51% in its second weekend. And that just confirms what I suspected all along— a Dora the Explorer movie, no matter how good, was always going to be a hard sell.

Dropping that much seems to be more of the norm.

Every movie drops more than half on its second weekend. The first weekend matters more.

Yeah, did it do well in its first weekend?

It had a 17 million opening weekend, currently 37 million domestic and 50 million worldwide. On a budget of 50 million that isn't horrible but not exactly an attention grabber. Dora itself having an Uncertain Audience in the sense that people weren't sure what to think of the movie likely contributed, and while they are targeting different demographics being surrounding by Angry Birds 2 and a Fast and Furious movie probably didn't help.